Details Matter

Oh, the possibilities in a blank page.

Stone Yamashita notebooks are seducing me away from the Moleskine. They’re the size of a Foreign Affairs, and have thick, creamy, tear-off pages that are lined on one side and squared on the next. The brown covers come with four provoking titles, the choice of which reveals something to you and about you. My first notebook said CH-CH-CH… on the front, and CHANGES on the back. The latest bookends DESIRE with FEAR, and I hope the sheets in between represent the middle way.

There are pages set aside for tempting lists:

LIFE
ACTION ITEMS
WISHLIST
WHAT THEY SAID
WHAT I SAID
WHAT I SHOULD HAVE SAID
WHAT I HEARD
WORK
TO DO
TO PUT OFF

Inside, there’s a tiny, printed inscription:

This is my notebook. A collection of my thoughts, ideas, some other people’s thoughts, some good stuff, some useless stuff. All written down, mostly scribbled, some stuff that I can no longer read, in an attempt to preserve a brilliant moment in time. (Or, at the time, I thought it was a brilliant moment.) I got this notebook from Stone Yamashita Partners. They always feed me. They’re the kind of office that allows dogs. They believe in the power of good thinking to invoke change. And so do I.

On my first day, two months ago, my SY[P] co-workers gave me a neat stack of San Francisco guidebooks and a household address book that they’d filled with notes on opthalmologists, florists, car repair shops, hikes, plumbers, restaurants, dentists, and babysitters. This streak of inventive empathy, made elegantly tangible, runs through the culture from the stationery cupboard to the client presentations. It’s what makes them excellent, and it makes me glad they found me.

The journal is a thoughtful tool (amongst many) and something I can’t quite do without. I now have a leather jacket to protect it but I do miss the “oohh…” moments that catch me off guard. In fact, I do actually recall the journals becoming an ice breaker at a client’s meeting. Well, you may still hear chuckles in the back room (where the journals are kept) from time to time.